Since Japan's Earth Simulator supercomputer shocked Washington two years ago, there's been a sense that the United States could lose its lead in other scientific disciplines, just as it did in climate science. The National Science Foundation last month reported that U.S. dominance in critical scientific fields is slipping, as measured in the number of patents awarded and papers published. The percentage of American Nobel Prize winners has fallen during the 2000s amid competition from Europe and Japan. And fewer American students are training to become scientists and engineers. Meanwhile, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea have seen rapid growth in the number of patents awarded over the past 20 years. Europe is poised to take the lead in particle physics, with the world's largest supercollider in Switzerland scheduled to open in 2007. Spain is planning to build the second-most-powerful computer for general scientific use.
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There's a business threat inherent in that shift. The Earth Simulator Center in Japan is reportedly negotiating deals with Japanese automakers to use time on the world's fastest computer to boost their quality and productivity. And NEC Corp. could disclose an even faster system next year. "We in the United States need to create new computer architectures that can boost computing power by many times over our current machines--and everybody else's," Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said at a press conference last month.
In April, people from Dupont, BellSouth, GM, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Merck, and Morgan Stanley held the first meeting of the Council on Competitiveness' high-performance computing committee. Their goal: figure out how to square the interests of government scientists and policy makers with those of private-sector computer users. One area of work is trying to form new public-private partnerships so companies can access experimental computing architectures years before they become affordable enough for budget-conscious businesses.
Boeing director Budworth, who's active in the project, says the Dreamliner will be Boeing's first airplane whose assembly will be modeled more or less end to end on a supercomputer. Software that can plot the location of every part and tool and on the factory floor is becoming so sophisticated that a petaflop computer may soon be necessary to run it.
That kind of talk can only please Donofrio, who admits the Blue Gene project carries a lot of risk. "Blue Gene is an incredibly bold adventure for us," he says. "There are a lot of people who like this idea of deep computing. And we'd have to say Blue Gene is a pretty deep computer." His greatest fear? That there won't be users bold enough to follow IBM's lead and try to run one big problem on the whole thing. "The new horizon is 'What can you do with this thing?' Not 'What can a thousand of you do with it?'" he says. "That's innovation. That will light up the board."
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